Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Monthly Archives: October 2018

The strange traffic patterns here continued here for the fourth straight month and I am at a loss to explain it. It is unusual for no posts from the current month to make the list, much less four times in a row. And while a few posts on the list make some sense, you have to get down to 25th place before you hit a post from October. (Gamigo Buys then Guts Trion World, which was popular and linked elsewhere is in position 25.)

I cannot tell where some of this is coming from as the referrers count is much lower than the total visitors or page views, though that is not unusual. Some sites just don’t show up in that list for various reasons, including Massively OP. I can see the traffic hitting those pages in the Flag Counter reports, and it is from all over the US on Windows, iOS, and Mac OS, so it isn’t just one guy hitting refresh. So I just don’t know.

Meanwhile, WordPress.com continues with its ever encroaching ad placement. You won’t see it here, as I am on a yearly plan that turns ads off, but if I hit other WP.com sites with a browser that doesn’t have Ad Block of some sort (which I have to have for work), I end up seeing more and more ads. The latest is an add that drops down from the top of the page to obscure what you’re reading.

Fill in the gap between the top and the other ads

This is one of those things that makes me shake my head. Ad blockers were not created because people don’t want to support online content, they were created because the ads grew obnoxious enough for people to look for a way to block them.

And then there was this beauty. I took a look at my other site using Chrome on my iPad, where there is no ad block extension, to use a link from the sidebar and had my whole session hijacked by an ad.

WP.com lets ads take over your browser session

I love those faked comments at the bottom from two and three years ago. And this ad led into another and another. I couldn’t get back to my other site.

And so WP.com has inadvertently joined in on promoting ad blockers by becoming an ad shitshow. Well done. I could not recommend WP.com as a platform it you plan to blog. Go make a Blogger account for that, and make sure you have an ad blocker if you visit a WordPress.com site.

The then still in early access H1Z1 had King of the Kill removed from its name, reverting back to just H1Z1. This was due to as-yet-still-unrealized plans by Daybreak to bring the game to China where they couldn’t have “kill” in the name. They have since changed their mind and renamed the game again. It is now H1Z1: Battle Royale, or maybe Z1 Battle Royale. It is honestly hard to tell/care at this point. All I know is it will probably have another new name before this gets to the “Five Years Ago” section in 2022.

As the month headed towards its end CCP released the Lifeblood expansion for EVE Online which changed moon mining, upgraded The Agency, and added a bunch of PvE content. There was also a joke about lighting farts to be made.

However, following EVE Vegas, where VR was heavily emphasized, and the Lifeblood expansion, CCP had a round of layoffs and effectively stopped developing for VR. Among teams hit hard was the community team.

I was trying out War Thunder. After failing to get through the tutorial for World of Warplanes, I opted for its competitor, which seems better suited for the inept like me. I was able to get out there and be a target for other players while bombing at least.

In one of the worst kept secrets in video game development it was announced that BioWare’s MMO project was in fact Star Wars: The Old Republic. Their subscription goals were, of course, quite modest.

I celebrated my 15 years of playingSojourn/TorilMUD with the first in a series of posts. Nostalgia FTW! And I guess that makes this the 25 year mark. My, how time flies! I probably need a post about that.

And speaking of Nostalgia, Tipa was out looking for EverQuest blogs. I’m not sure any were discovered. EverQuest itself launched its fifteenth expansion, Seeds of Destruction, which brought NPC mercenaries to the game to assist players.

A shooter named Call of Duty launched. Now Activision’s annual revenue pretty much depends on shipping a sequel to it.

Lineage II launched as well. The successor to the original Lineage, which was in last month’s post celebrating its 20th anniversary, it had the usual problem of MMORPG sequels in never living up to the success of the original.

Twenty Years Ago

The Rise of Rome expansion came out for Age of Empires.

Thirty Years Ago

The Sega MegaDrive launched in Japan. Mentioned mostly because I ended up with a Sega Genesis, the name used in the US, a few years later.

Forty Years Ago

Really, am I going back that far now? Yes I am! Back in October of 1978 Space Invaders arrived in North America. I posted about that event. It was a big deal back in the day.

what game has more people playing everquest 1 or everquest 2 in 2018?
[The original by all reports]

sylvana windrunner rule 34 animated
[Really?]

epic journeys and random encounters (world of warcraft) hentai
[I was with you until that last word]

china gay 3d game pc
[The state probably won’t okay that]

EVE Online

The Pearl Abyss acquisition of CCP was finalized and there was EVE Vegas. While the latter brought news of the future, my time in game was actually pretty low key. I did get my one kill mail in for the month as I joined in on shooting one of Pandemic Horde’s high sec structures. Otherwise I spent some time with the Crimson Harvest event and that was about it.

It has been a bit of a tough month on third party sites. First Total EVE went down due to a problem with their provider. Then EVE Files which, among other things, hosts the null sec influence maps, had a RAID failure and went down, taking with it a lot of New Eden history. The influence maps are created elsewhere, but have been publicly archived on EVE Files. There are backups, and Chribba started moving some of the videos stored there to YouTube, but how this will work out is unclear. And then there was a scare with the DOTLAN infrastructure earlier in the month. The EVE Online ecosystem is fragile and getting more so as it ages. [Total EVE is back up.]

And then there was the Monthly Economic Report for September, which failed to materialize this month. I don’t know if that is over as a thing, but this is the first time CCP has missed a month since they got serious about it over two years ago.

EverQuest II

I made my way to level 100 at last, though that doesn’t seem like much of an achievement when I tell you I started at level 96. But that leaves out the real adventure of returning to the game, which is simply figuring out where to go. Anyway, I paused for a bit at level 100 to do some of the Halloween event stuff. That was probably to stave off deciding on which path to choose now that I am at 100. This is never easy.

Pokemon Go

I made my first “Best Friend” in Pokemon Go. It happened to be my wife, so true in game as in the real world. It turn out that making a best friend yields quite a good chunk of experience. Here is what you get by levels of friendship:

Good Friends – 3,000 xp

Great Friends – 10,000 xp

Ultra Friends – 50,000 xp

Best Friends – 100,000 xp

I was about 40K shy of level when the best friend event happened, which pushed me right into level 34. Still a long way to go to level 40, but I have some more friends on my list to help me along as our friendships level up. You do need to send 90 gifts to get to the best friend level, and my current problem is always running out. I need Pokestops to be more reliable at dispensing gifts.

There was also the introduction of 4th generation into the game, which gave us all new Pokemon to catch. That helped boost my Pokedex count.

Sort of stopped playing WoW it seems. This is me being me. At some intellectual level I want to finish up the Kul Tiras campaign and get my main to level 120, but somewhere deep within me is the bit that gets me to log in and play, and that bit isn’t having it. Oh well. This seems to be following my usual pattern of diving into a new WoW expansion, playing for a bit, then going away for six months or so until the issues are settled.

Hallow’s End did get me logging back in some, but the mount of the Headless Horseman still eludes me. While waiting for the queue to pop my main hit level 118. Who is the slowest to level now, eh?

Coming Up

BlizzCon is the day after tomorrow. Those at the event or watching from home with the Virtual Ticket don’t get a cute pet or mount in WoW this year. Instead it will be a chance to try WoW Classic. The Barrens and Westfall will be available to download and play. I expect this to be examined in minute detail and the topic of articles and blog posts for at least a week afterwards.

There was word that we might get the LOTRO legendary server on November 6th, but there is no official announcement that I have seen. And the LOTRO Twitter account later denied everything. It would be nice if there was a date front page, center on the LOTRO web site. The problematic nature of this server aside, SSG failing to do a decent promotional run up to its open… which, again, would be well served by something like a big count down timer to build up some excitement… is just typical of how the game has been handled for over a decade. There is a quote from Tolkien that I can’t find at the moment, about the race of man failing to live up to its potential that seems to fit very well to LOTRO as well.

There will also be the new expansion for EverQuest II coming on the 13th. I’m still too far back to worry about buying that, but it will unlock some new content and more crazy stat boosts.

And then the word is that WildStar will be shut down by the end of the month, so it is your last chance to take a look… before somebody gets an emulator project off the ground.

Finally, Daylight Savings Time ends in the US… for locations in the US that observe the change… this coming weekend. It will be slightly less dark when I drive to work now.

The pre-Halloween week, the eighth in our Fall Fantasy Movie League, is now in the past, but not before a bit of a last minute surprise.

The options for the week were:

Halloween $666
A Star is Born $243
Hunter Killer $202
Venom $201
Goosebumps 2 $128
The Hate U Give $100
First Man $89
Mid 90s $88
Smallfoot $86
Night School $57
Indivisible $39
The Old Man and the Gun $36
Bad Times $34
Johnny English Strikes Back $33
The House with a Clock $16

My gut last week as I wrote this said that the new stuff on the list was to be avoided. Sure, my Monday Hot Takes lineup went hard on Mid 90s, with 1x A Star is Born, 1x Venom, and 6x Mid 90s, but I got over that by mid-week.

Still, I was on the right track for an anchor. I couldn’t get on board with Halloween, even at the too-on-the-nose price of $666, and Hunter Killer was in the category of “new stuff” to be avoided, so I was left fiddling with variations of A Star is Born or Venom or some combination of the two.

In the end I decided to go all-in with Venom, anchoring on four screens of that, backed up with one screen each of Smallfoot, Night School, The Old Man and the Gun, and The House with a Clock.

Not a horrible selection, all things considered. The Saturday estimates put me in tenth place, while Sunday had me in ninth, but the gap between the whole sixteen player list wasn’t that big.

The perfect pick ended up being 3x A Star is Born, 1x Venom, 4x TheHouse with a Clock. I was on the right track for an anchor at least. Nobody in the league hit that combo.

However, once the actuals thread announced the results I checked the league and found a surprise; a few people appeared to be doing much better than I expected.

Fall FML Week 8 – Initial Top Four Scores

Also, Johnny English was suddenly the best performer rather than TheHouse with a Clock. A closer look showed Johnny English with a bit more than the $1.6 million box office it was alleged to have made.

Worth a K no doubt

That happened to be the same amount that Halloween made for the weekend, not to mention being about 20x what the Sunday estimate had it down for. This was clearly a data entry error, which led to a dream/nightmare scenario for somebody.

Always bet on Johnny

There were plenty of messages about that in FML chatter.

Once it was corrected, things shook out a little closer to how I expected, with the week’s top ten looking like this:

Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $60,377,241

Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $58,829,377

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $58,211,494

Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $57,408,588

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $56,551,150

grannanj’s Cineplex – $56,522,357

Goat Water Picture Palace – $56,091,308

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $56,091,308

Wilhelm’s Kul Tiras Kino – $55,421,160

I HAS BAD TASTE – $54,830,773

Po was on top with 1x Halloween, 1x Venom, and 6x The House with a Clock, the last being the best performer and worth an extra $2 million per screen in bonus. But the anchors in the top ten were pretty varied, and even 7x Goosebumps 2 as an anchor beat out my choice.

Still, the gap between first and tenth was less than $6 million, so the overall seasonal ranking did not change much.

Wilhelm’s Kul Tiras Kino – $580,296,393

Goat Water Picture Palace – $549,675,241

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $544,151,551

Too Orangey For Crows – $540,773,830

I HAS BAD TASTE – $531,527,330

Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $516,275,892

Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $512,050,156

Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $511,935,067

grannanj’s Cineplex – $506,460,148

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $504,510,372

I think that is the same ten people as last week’s list, with a couple of positional changes.

The alternate score though, that ended up looking like this.

Wilhelm’s Kul Tiras Kino – 49

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – 45

Goat Water Picture Palace – 40

Too Orangey For Crows – 39

Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – 36

Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – 33

I HAS BAD TASTE – 31

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – 31

Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – 28

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – 24

Well, that was also the same ten people as last week with some changes in position, though not the same ten people as the overall seasonal score. Darren, who would be in eleventh in the overall score is in eighth with the alternate scoring.

Overall, everybody who has been playing has been in the top ten at least twice so far this season, so everybody has some score.

So that is how it stands at the end of week eight. Now to look forward to week nine. The options are:

Dropping off the list from last week are The House with a Clock , Indivisible , Bad Times, and Johnny English Strikes Back.

Replacing them are Bohemian Rhapsody, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, Nobody’s Fool, and Suspiria.

At the top of the price chart is Bohemian Rhapsody. It has lots of buzz and a bit of controversy to go with it. It seems a likely anchor for the post-Halloween weekend, though it is priced so you can only get one screen of it. Long range forecasts had it at about $40 million for the three day weekend, and it seems likely to get there in my book.

Next up is The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, which I am shortening to just The Nutcracker for ease of typing and maximum confusion. This is the movie version of the literary adaptation of the famed ballet, done by Disney, so who knows how the story ends up. But it has lots of famous names, including Morgan Freeman and is projected at somewhere in the $20 to $25 million range for the weekend. Seems priced a little low compared to Bohemian Rhapsody, so might be a better anchor if you think we’re close enough to the holiday season to get into this kind of movie.

Nobody’s Fool is yet another Tyler Perry production. The man is a machine. And he has a regular following, so this is probably good for the $12-$15 million being projected for it.

And then there is Suspiria, the plot for which is… complicated. At least it is beyond my ability to summarize. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is also being distributed by Amazon Studios, which means it won’t be on many screens. The expected count is 250 theaters. But I bet it will be on Amazon Prime soon!

Given all that and some tinkering with the Cineplex Builder, I ended up with the following picks for the Monday Hot Takes league; 1x Bohemian Rhapsody , 1x Halloween, 1x Nobody’s Fool, 1x First Man, 1x Mid 90s, and 3x The Old Man and the Gun.

That is kind of a shotgun pick in a world where the beginners guide suggest not having more than four or maybe five titles in your lineup, but it seems like that kind of week. Also, it used every dollar of my budget.

There was a bit of news last Friday when the Library of Congress announced that they would allow an exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act so that institutions interesting in preserving online games, MMOs and the like, could do so.

An exception had been previously granted for stand alone video games no longer published or otherwise available, so this was something of an expansion of that initial ruling. The Federal Register document is here for your perusal.

The document covers several rulings. The one you are looking for is labeled as section 8, but is listed out between sections 5 and 7, so it was probably meant to be section 6 as there is another section 8, concerning 3D printing, after section 7. Maybe this was an error… or maybe I just don’t understand how government documentation works.

This decision was greeted with almost universal acclaim in the niche genre that is fans of dead MMOs. The Museum of Digital Art and Entertainment (The MADE for short or The Video Game Museum colloquially) over in Oakland, about a 40 minute drive from my home, was particularly effusive. They were in the fight to make this happen, so were there to cheer once the ruling was announced. They tweeted out a couple of messages on Twitter that got a frenzy of support over in the comments at Massively OP, this one especially:

Hey Twitter fans: please go track down people who could legally get us Star Wars Galaxy's server code, and City of Heroes server code. If they agree to hand over the server code, we can bring those games back online legally.

I am going to quote that tweet here, just in case it spontaneously combusts out of sheer naivety:

Hey Twitter fans: please go track down people who could legally get us Star Wars Galaxy’s server code, and City of Heroes server code. If they agree to hand over the server code, we can bring those games back online legally.

That note contains the seeds of the problem being faced here. If you take some time to leaf through the document I linked at the above, you might have run into a paragraph opening with this sentence:

The Acting Register found that the record supported granting an expansion in the relatively discrete circumstances where a preservation institution legally possesses a copy of a video game’s server code and the game’s local code.

Therein lies the rub. To be within the law, and thus legally protected, a preservation institution like The MADE needs to obtain a copy of the server software legally. So far as I can tell, the only way to do this is to get a copy directly from the companies who hold the rights to these games, and that seems an impractical and unlikely scenario for several reasons.

First, there is the question as to what sort of infrastructure such a server might require.

Yes, people who put together emulators of these servers do so on the cheap, using whatever is to hand, so you might think this is a non-issue. But the official server software wasn’t designed to run on your desktop machine. This isn’t an automatic pass. This could be a problem because things as simple as the operating system and patch version required to the database connectivity expected to be in place. The server software might not run as provided without the ecosystem it was made to run with.

The MADE likes to point out that they managed to get Habitat up and running, but that was not only a game from a simpler time, but they were given the source code to work with. I cannot see many MMORPGs doing that for reasons covered below. Still, at least this is a technical issue, and enough time and effort could garner a solution.

Then there is figuring out who actually has the software and what shape it is in.

Let’s take Star Wars Galaxies as an example. That shut down in mid-December 2011, almost seven years ago. At that point it was run by Sony Online Entertainment, one small cog in the giant machine that is Sony.

Time to settle up with Jaba again

A little over three years after that SOE was bought and became Daybreak Game Company. One might assume that all SOE games, past and current, went with that deal. But I don’t know if that was actually so. Given that SWG was a licensed IP, it might have been too complicated, too expensive, or simply not possible or desirable to let Daybreak have that. It could be stowed away still with Sony.

And, once we figure out who has it, we have to see if the software has been archived in a way that it can still be accessed. The server software isn’t like the client, existing in the wild on hundreds of thousands of install disks. This is likely tightly held, produce on demand software. Somebody might need to run the build system to generate a copy.

Let me tell you a story about that sort of thing.

Midway through the first decade of the century a company I used to work for once had a formerly famous consumer film company call up and ask for a patch for the server software they bought from us nearly a decade back. It was on IBM OS/2 and we had long since switched to Windows server. But that was fine, we had kept the OS/2 build system machines in the lab. Only when somebody decided to power the system on the drive on the main machine wouldn’t spin up. And while we had archival backups stored off site, there wasn’t anybody around who could re-create the build system. And that was all before we had to figure out the problem that company was having, update the code, and run a build.

Since the company calling us wasn’t current on their maintenance contract… we were surprised they were still running our software… we declined to put in the effort. We probably could of done it, but the work required was not trivial. Even with the company in question willing to pay us, we had more lucrative avenues to pursue. Software development is as much choosing what to focus on as anything, since there are always more plans and ideas than there is time.

If we weren’t going to do it for money, we certainly weren’t going to do it for free, which is what organizations like The MADE will expect. And no company is going to let outsiders troll through their company to look for such software, so finding it relies on a current insider getting permission from the company and using their own time to find things. This isn’t impossible, but the candidates able to perform this task are probably few.

And, finally, there is the question who can legally provide the server software.

The above are both solvable problems, things that could be made to happen if the right people were to volunteer some time and effort. Getting the right people to green light this sort of project though, that feels like the highest hurdle of all.

I am going to go ahead and declare Star Wars Galaxies lost to any preservation effort for the foreseeable future right up front based on this. At a minimum you need Disney, who holds the rights to the IP, to go along with this, and I cannot see that happening. Mickey Mouse doesn’t even get out of bed unless he’s getting paid.

So let’s look at City of Heroes instead. This is easier. NCsoft owns all the rights, so there is no problem dealing with IP problems. There should be no issue here, right?

The final plea

No server software stands alone. Even if the previous problems can be brushed aside, it is very likely that Cryptic, in developing City of Heroes, licensed third party libraries, utilities, and other assets in order to create the game. That licensing likely doesn’t allow NCsoft to give the server software out, even for a good cause.

This, by the way, is part of the answer to every question about why companies don’t open source their games when they shut them down. They cannot if they don’t own all the code.

In order to cover themselves, NCsoft would have to run down every third party aspect of the software and get the permission of the licensing entity. My gut says that NCsoft isn’t going to do this and, if they did, that getting every single third party on board would not be easy.

But if you can get past all of that, then you can have an MMORPG in your museum.

And I don’t even want to delve into the question of which version of a game ought to be preserved. The answer to that will only make people angry since it likely won’t be the launch version or the version from what you might believe to be the golden era of the game. It will most likely be the final version available from the build system.

All of that ought to be enough to make you say “screw it” and just start working on an emulator. That has to be easier, right? You can do what you want with that. Then you can put it up in your museum.

Well, there is a whole paragraph devoted to that in the ruling.

The Acting Register did not, however, recommend an exemption to allow for instances where the preservation institution lacks lawful possession of the server software. She found the record insufficient to support a finding that the recreation of video game server software as described by proponents is likely to be a fair use. A number of scenarios described by proponents do not involve preserving server software that is already in an institution’s collections, but instead appear to involve something more akin to reconstructing the remote server. She found that this activity distinguishes proponents’ request from the preservation activity at issue in the case law upon which they relied. Moreover, she noted, the reconstruction of a work implicates copyright owners’ exclusive right to prepare derivative works.

That sums up pretty much as, “No, you may not have cheezeburger.” Recreating is not preserving. You either get the real deal or you get nothing at all.

And so it goes. The door has been opened ever so slightly for the preservation of MMOs, but there are still many problems in the way.

Finally I want to call out what I consider a disingenuous to the point of being nearly deceptive part of the tweet above from The MADE. This phrasing irks me greatly:

…we can bring those games back online legally

Without the necessary context, always a problem on Twitter, one might assume that people will be able to fire up their clients and play their favorite shut down MMO if only The MADE can get the server code. However, this is covered in the document linked at the top as well:

Video games in the form of computer programs embodied in physical or downloaded formats that have been lawfully acquired as complete games, that do not require access to an external computer server for gameplay, and that are no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace, solely for the purpose of preservation of the game in a playable form by an eligible library, archives, or museum, where such activities are carried out without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage and the video game is not distributed or made available outside of the physical premises of the eligible library, archives, or museum.

The emphasis is my own.

So no, should any of this come to pass, you are not suddenly going to be able to play City of Heroes or Star Wars Galaxies or any other closed MMO. This whole thing isn’t being done just so you can play a video game. Unless you’re willing to schlep on over to Oakland to visit The MADE in person, you won’t be able to see what has been preserved.

And even then, I wonder what a visitor will be allowed to do. MMOs are strange beasts. They aren’t like Donkey Kong with discreet interaction parameters and a “Game Over” state after which everything starts again fresh. MMOs, at least the ones mentioned above, are MMORPGs, with an emphasis on the RPG part. You go into the world and play a role, interact with things, accumulate items and wealth. A story unfolds before you as you progress, and it doesn’t reset when you put down the controller and walk away.

How will a place like The MADE handle this sort of game?

Do you let every random person who walks in create a new character? Do you have some template characters available for people to wander around with? Do you let people wander around the world and die or do things that irrevocably change the nature of a character’s position in the world? Do you store progress? Do you wipe progress every night?

Probably the best case, within the law, scenario here is that a place like The MADE will get software that will let them setup a closed environment in their facility where the general public will get to see, maybe poke at, but probably not play in any depth, certain MMOs. The only people likely allowed greater access will be press writing articles or academics doing research… and the occasional big donor or volunteer who will get to make a character and play. The rest of us will just have to feel better that something has been preserved and move on with our lives.

Which is fine. I can live with that.

But I suspect that many people expect a lot more out of these efforts.

Here in the last days of October SuperData Research finally has their September sales chart out for us. I was a bit worried after they were acquired by Nielsen that they might stop feeding us this ranking regularly. Now if I could just get CCP to give us the September MER as well.

Anyway, to the chart.

SuperData Research Top 10 – September 2018

Last month saw the Battle for Azeroth surge for World of Warcraft, which jumped it up to second place on the PC end of the chart, putting it ahead of League of Legends for the first time in the history of this monthly report.

However that head of steam didn’t seem to last, even with Blizz offering a special mount if you would just commit to a six month subscription. WoW dropped to fifth position, though that still put it a bit ahead of its perennial seventh place slot, so maybe some people jumped on the mount bandwagon. Of course, if they paid for six months in September then they won’t have paid anything in October, so we’ll see if WoW drops more next month.

WoW’s loss was LoL’s gain though, as Riot’s game moved up into second place as the constant top four on the chart were locked in together again, having also pushed Monster Hunter: World down from fourth to seventh spot.

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds grabbed sixth position ahead of the so-popular-the-NHL-banned-it Fortnite, which came in at eighth. Rounding out the list are a couple of the usual suspects from the bottom of the list, World of Tanks in ninth and CS:GO in tenth. Hearthstone, which made the list last month, fell off for September.

In the middle, the console chart has Destiny 2 at the top, most likely due to the release of the Forsaken DLC last month. Marvel’s Spider-Man, a new release, captured second place, while FIFA 19 came in at third place. Fornite, last month’s top entry, sank to fourth place in the face of this new content, with NBA 2K19, another new release, close behind in fifth.

FIFA 18, apparently not completely sapped by the release of its successor, stayed on the list in sixth position. Call of Duty: WWII fell to seventh, but stayed ahead of the fresh Shadows of the Tomb Raider in eighth. 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V, which has stayed on the list, and even topped it at times despite its age, stayed alive in ninth place while PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds showed back up in tenth.

Among the titles pushed out of the way was Blizzard’s Overwatch.

Then on the mobile end of the chart, there was only a minor re-arrangement of last month’s titles, with Pokemon Go holding onto third position and Candy Crush Saga moving from tenth to seventh spot.

Other items from the report:

FIFA 19 scores best digital launch in franchise history. We estimate FIFA 19 digital console units grew 18% compared to FIFA 18 last year. Sales for the digital launch of FIFA hit another record, although the series continues to lag other AAA franchises in terms of download rates.

Destiny 2 gets a big boost from Forsaken. Destiny 2 topped our digital console rankings this month on the back of the new Forsaken expansion and an increase in deluxe edition purchases. Over 60% of all monthly active users purchased the expansion.

NBA 2K19 marks a new franchise peak – but with a caveat. While NBA 2K19 digital console unit sales were up year-over-year from NBA 2K18, growth fell short of the rate seen in the past couple of years.It should be noted that this year’s iteration of the game launched earlier in the month.

As I mention in a previous post, the null sec alliances brought their recent conflict to high sec using war decs, allowing TEST to assail Pandemic Horde’s trade hub in Perimeter. PH’s structures in Perimeter were reinforced while TEST dropped its own citadels, a faction Fortizar and a Keepstar.

War decs piled up between the groups as The Imperium joined in on the side of TEST and its Legacy Coalition allies while Black Legion jumped in to assist Pandemic Horde. Notably missing was the rest of PanFam, including Pandemic Legion and NCDot. Pandemic Horde has truly grown into its own entity.

It looked like there might be a fight brewing in high sec, just one jump from Jita.

Instead, Pandemic Horde decided to punt on its high sec trading empire. There is a post over at New Eden Report about the impact of this on the market. But for those of us just looking to shoot things, there would be no war. Pandemic Horde opted to contest neither the structures TEST deployed nor defend their own structures. At best there would just be a structure shoot to take them out.

Being in Reavers, structure shoots are clearly my bag. And since our war dec was still in place, I went out to shoot the PH Fortizar just because I could.

The Safe Trade Hub is no longer Safe

The nervous bit was getting there. I undocked from Jita 4-4 with my market/training implant clone to run to another station where I could install a jump clone. Then I ran back. Fortunately, the usual people who have us war dec’d and are generally camping the undock at 4-4 had joined us in the war. I was able to safely setup a local clone, jump to it, then roll back into 4-4 to pick up a ship.

I had a Jackdaw handy there and, not wanting to spend any ISK I didn’t have to, I rolled out of Jita to Perimeter in that.

Jackdaw on the way

When I arrived the shoot was already under way. TEST had a fleet sitting at range shooting the Fortizar. There was another group about 120 degrees off from them shooting the citadel as well. That group was putting out constant beams, which confused me for a bit.

Jackdaw spotting the red beams, TEST fleet ball visible

When I put the camera on that group though, the answer was clear. It was a small fleet of Leshaks, the Triglavian battleship, (supported by a few Nestors) responsible for those beams.

A Leshak at the shoot

The Triglavian weaponry, the precursor weapons, fire a continuous beam that puts out more damage the longer it stays on a target.

I had warped in at 50km and went into orbit around the citadel until the structure got down to about 25%. I only noticed after I arrived that the Jackdaw was fit for rockets rather than light missiles, which meant I would have to move in close to get my hits in. Even in sniper mode that meant being about 25km off the Fortizar. I was wondering if wandering in that close might draw the attention of the defensive weaponry.

However, that didn’t turn out to be an issue. I decreased the radius of my orbit to bring the rocket launcher in range and let fly. I am way down the list for total damage, but at least I got on the kill mail. It has been a quiet month with the peace agreement and PH not defending in Perimeter, so this is the only kill mail I am on for October. I try to be on one every month just to prove I am alive.

And so Pandemic Horde lost its foothold in Perimeter.

The PH logo shortly before the explosion

If you look at the kill mail, you will see that the five Leshaks in that group managed to get the top five slots for damage. Those precursor weapons work as advertised I guess.

This past week, in celebration of the release of the sequel, Screen Junkies took a look at the original classic from 1978, Halloween.

I was too young to go see it when it came out, but I remember hearing about it. And, of course, when VCRs and video rentals became a thing half a decade later, my roommate and I watch it along with most of the movies it fostered with its success. So many of the tropes we associate with the genre started, or were solidified, with this movie.

The first presentation on Saturday of EVE Vegas was from CCP Lebowski. Titled “FLEX, Decs, & What Comes Next,” it covered a stretch of topics, but opened with the latest round of structures from the Upwell Consortium. You can watch it here.

FLEX structures are set to replace the last few null sec infrastructure roles that still require Player Owned Starbases. After that the noble POS and the horrible code base that supports it, long complained about by CCP, can be retired. Maybe. A POS is still a pretty hand structure, so they may still need something to replace the simple ability to drop a safe spot in hostile space.

Anyway, the new FLEX structures are coming, FLEX standing for “Fast Logistical EXpansion,” and they share some characteristics.

The Basics of FLEX Structures

There are three FLEX structures coming, each replacing a POS function. There is the Pharolux Cyno Beacon, on which many an unwary capital pilot will probably die, the Tenebrex Cyno Jammer, which will let you stop capital drops in your territory, and the Ansiblex Jump Gate, which is going to open a can of worms we’ve seen before.

And it is that last one, the Ansiblex Jump Gate, that I want to bring up here, because it has some interesting features.

Jump Bridge becomes Jump Gate

There are some very spiffy aspects of this new structure. The model looks good, they align in space to the star system they to which they are connected, and the animations for it are superb. The latter will also be used with the upgraded art and animations for jump gates throughout New Eden.

But the thing I want to highlight is how unlike the old jump bridge the Ansiblex really is. It is the last two bullet points that are key here:

No Jump Fatigue

No Ship Size Restrictions

My first thought on seeing those two items was that these were, in essence, player made star gates, something that had been mentioned as a possibility quite some time back. I was kind of hoping that such structures would send us into new space, maybe with some new rules, but these seem to fit the bill if you get right down to it. Promise delivered on, if not in the way expected.

My second thought, which came very close on the first, and which I heard echoed by Dirk MacGirk amongst others, was, “Here is the return of the Eye of Terror!”

The Eye of Terror!

The Eye of Terror was a jump bridge network setup during the Great War. While I was playing EVE Online at the time, I was nowhere near null sec. It is, however, an item of legend, so I went to the Goon Wiki to get a description:

The original Eye of Terror was a series of jump bridges finished in December of 2007 during The Great EVE War. It ran from 46DP in Tenerifis to P8- in Feythabolis, enabling a constant stream of Goons into RISE’s living room for 24/7 harassment.

Since late August, RISE had been increasingly penned in to the “RIT Triangle,” their cluster of home station systems past the P8- choke point, and the constant presence of Black Ops and Pandemic Legion kept their station systems disabled and left them with no means of escape.

By the time the Eye of Terror actually opened RISE resistance had already been reduced to sitting in stations with the odd, terribly fit ship to attempt to escape. The stream of ships through the Eye rapidly destroyed their towers, many of which ran out of fuel as RISE logistics had given up or were trapped in stations.

That was the first Eye of Terror, and legend has it that its construction and effectiveness led to CCP changing the rules for jump bridges, restricting them to one per system so that fleet would at least have to expose themselves to gates along the way rather than just warping from POS to POS and jumping in relative safety.

Then there was the second Eye of Terror, the jump bridge line that I took so often back in the day, the one that first led to the beachhead in Cloud Ring for the invasion of Fountain. Later it was extended, first through Fountain, then Delve, and then into Querious.

If a fight was happening in way down south we could just hop in our ships up in Deklein and be down there in a pretty short time. And so battles like HED-GP came along and crashed the server. Yes, there were other factors, like the proliferation of drones and the Slowcats doctrine that were not helping. But the fact that people could log in anywhere in null sec and get to an escalating fight… all the easier because time dilation slowed the fight down while those traveling were moving at full speed… led to a pile on after pile on.

So CCP changed the way travel worked in null sec. The Phoebe update came along and introduced jump fatigue. Capital ships could no longer make jumps in rapid succession, and the same applied to jump bridges. Then we got Fozzie Sov, which sought to disperse battles over sovereignty. Small fights were going to break up the stagnation of null sec.

Certainly, some groups responded by consolidating their holdings. The Imperium drew back into a much smaller footprint in the north though, in the end, that was still more than could be held by the coalition. The Casino War proved that well enough. There was that and other shake outs, but in the end there was still something of an equilibrium. Outsiders and pundits still speak of the “blue donut” as though repeating it makes it so.

And then… something happened at CCP. I think they decided big fights were in their best interest. But the jump fatigue penalties started getting pared back. At the start, with Phoebe, you could make a character useless for months by taking too many jumps. That got reduced to five days. Now it is down to five hours. But it still injects a wait period between jumps. You can’t just jump or take jump bridges in rapid succession.

Only soon you will be able to again, and I am at a loss to explain why. Travel is a factor you must plan for in New Eden. Jump fatigue seemed to have a purpose in that. Now that whole “3 minutes per light year” travel time metric goal of just four years ago will be straight out the window.

When the new FLEX structures go in, when the Ansiblex Jump Gate becomes a thing, travel in null sec will lose its burden again. Subcap fleets will be able to cross large distances at will, giving coalitions the power to hold onto more territory. And it won’t just be subcaps, because capitals, supercaps, and titans will be able to take those new jump gates as well.

Yes, CCP points out that it will cost in liquid ozone. But I suspect they underestimate the abilities of GSOL, the miracle working logistical arm of the Imperium. I bet if The Mittani told them that there was a need to move every titan in the coalition in the next 24 hours, they would have supplies laid in and ships ready to refuel jump bridges along the whole route. I think we’ve already demonstrated that cost and effort are not really barriers.

So there we’ll be soon enough. But the gate animations will be cool. I’m tempted get FRAPS setup again to take videos of giant fleets passing through these new structures as the third Eye of Terror takes shape.